PHPFog, the portland based startup trying to push PHP into the PaaS space, yesterday announced that they have raised $1.8 Million funding from Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital, Founder’s Co-Op, and other prominent angel investors. PHPFog is currently in the private beta. This funding will help them add more developers and launch earlier than their initial timeframe.

Founded in 2010, PHPFog offers easy deployment and scaling of PHP applications in the cloud without worrying about nitty gritty ops tasks. They also offer one-click deployments for many popular PHP apps and frameworks including WordPress, Drupal, Kohana, Zend, and SugarCRM. With their N-Tier scaling, the service is highly reliable because every part of their web stack has built-in redundancy and failover.

Why I think it is important?

Even though I got the news on monday, I couldn’t publish it along with other media outlets. However, I still wanted to do a post because I consider this important for two reasons.

Along with many others in the industry, I also strongly believe that PaaS is the Future of Cloud Services. PHPFog being a PaaS startup makes them a very interesting player. If they execute well, they are going to be an important part of this PaaS future. Most of the web applications are written on PHP and their platform will help these apps move easily to the cloud world.

In May, 2010, Geva Perry wrote a blog post On GigaOm wondering who will build the LAMP cloud. Essentially he was wondering about who will build a PHP PaaS solution. After he wrote a post, Geva Perry, James Urquhart and myself followed it up with a podcast discussing the same topic. We thought there is a gap in the PaaS space without a PHP PaaS provider. PHPFog fills the gap with their platform and if they do it right, it is going to be disruptive.

PHPFog is well positioned to be the Heroku of PHP and this round of funding will help them get necessary development resources to go there. I still haven’t spoken to them yet but I hope to do it sometime in the future and get a better feeling for their platform. Even without a public availability of the service or getting to see the platform, I have a good feeling that their platform is going to take off pretty well. After all, there are millions of PHP apps and websites in the internet and they need a home in the cloudy world.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

5 responses to “Importance of PHPFog’s 1.8 Million Funding”

Its nice to see more funding going into cloud/PaaS space, but PHP/LAMP related PaaS is the least sexy of all PaaS solutions, IF its focused on PHP/LAMP.

PHP as a stack is rediculously well supported and wide spread on every shape/size hosting environment. Any benefits claimed around easy deployment and scalability are already provided by a player like RightScale, even though they are not a ‘PHP PaaS’ solution.

Unless they drop something unique, seems like PHPFog ends up competing against a RightScale type competitor by price alone, not to say that the market for cloud/developers/etc isnt huge and they cant/wont be successfull, just tough value prop.

Handling multi-tenant scenarios is important/valuable, but if you are scaling an app to level of loadbalancing, memcache, etc, multi-tenancy is pretty irrelevant since you have a single app running across several machines

The whole technology section of phpfog’s site seems geared towards scaling up PHP apps in a smooth/reliable manner